4 Insights Into Bar Management

When it comes to the hospitality industry, running a successful bar may be one of the most difficult disciplines. Bar management and overseeing each operation that is essential for the bar to be profitable can bring troubles to even seasoned bar managers and/or owners. Understanding how each piece of the business plays into the overall success can sometimes take experience and failure to completely understand. Luckily, we have a few secrets that you may or may not know that can help increase the likelihood of your bar being successful. When you break any business down to its fundamental core, there are two things that determine whether it will open again tomorrow; capturing all revenue and keeping costs as low as possible. While some luck may be needed along the way, being a successful bar manager takes leadership, managerial skills, and business intuition.

Here are a few secrets to help improve your skillset

Know your Clientele, Market, and Industry

Knowing what to stock, how to market to your clients and where your industry is heading are all crucial to success. Knowing and understanding your place in the market and what type of bar you are operating will allow you to serve your clientele effectively. Whether you run a sports bar, a high-end cocktail bar or a craft brew pub, find your niche and give your customers what they want. Sure, there will be times where your top shelf scotch drinker will feel like a bottle of Budweiser instead but gearing your inventory towards your target clientele is key. Understanding each of these aspects will help build a successful bar management foundations.

Attitude > Skill

The saying goes, “hire for attitude, train for skill.” This holds especially true in the customer service industry. When your profit line is purely determined by customer interactions, your staff must possess the right attitude or the bar will suffer. Providing a great bar experience goes beyond just the drinks that your customers will order because they can get the same drink down the road or at the store. What really makes the difference is the staff interactions and the atmosphere of the bar, one you can control and the other you hire for. All the necessary skills that are needed to be a successful bar employee can be learned through training. However, the right attitude is not something that comes easily. Hire a staff that is outgoing, friendly and has a team mentality to ensure that the bar management is successful, it takes all team members working towards the same goal.

Perhaps the best piece of advice that any manager can get is that once you become a “leader” instead of a “manager,” the job becomes exponentially easier. It doesn’t take much to manage a team of people when you have the power. What really matters is how you lead your team of employees to accomplish the goals of the bar. Lead through example, put in the work, go the extra mile and your employees will soon see that you view their job as just as important and will be motivated to work harder. Acknowledge the successes of your staff and use mistakes or failures as teaching tools.

POS System

Aside from the intangibles of being a great leader, one of the most important tools that will greatly increase the success of your bar is a reliable point of sale inventory management system. Not only does the POS system need to handle every customer transaction but it should be able to track your bar inventory in real time. Another great tool that can be tied into your POS system is outsourced video auditing to help identify high-risk areas of your daily operations that could be costing your bar significant amounts of money.

Glimpse provides remote video auditing services for bars and provides owners and managers with detailed reports (with time-stamped images) that can identify areas of non-compliance like unaccounted sales, poor or slow employee service, inventory loss and more. By identifying the areas in which your bar is losing valuable revenue, you stand a much greater chance of your bar being successful. Glimpse helps bars and restaurants capture all potential revenue, eliminate unnecessary costs and boost productivity through their video analysis program. To learn more about how Glimpse can improve your bar management, visit https://www.glimpsecorp.com/video-auditing/ today.

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